Lately, I have been bumping into a lot of people who I talk to about my interests in poverty eradication, BOP, and design. We get engaged into a deeper discussion, and then I sometimes hear this bizarre argument surfacing a lot…. from educated people whom I perceive to be sharp (probably what scares me the most)… that somehow, economics and capitalism is a zero-sum game. So, their argument goes, that "there always has to be rich people and poor people". That’s the way things work. People have to exploit and people have to be exploited.
Whereas in the past I’ve had to use examples of the creation of wealth out of "nothing"..AKA entrepreneurship through bootstrapping to counter this "capitalism as zero-sum" argument, I think the best refutations come in simple stories like this one and this one..
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